The correct answer is “middle children”.
Sort of a joke, but sort of not. The idea of the middle children needing to go off to make their own fortunes, and also being less attached to family/home, has never quite died out.
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There you go again, @ucbalumnus , with your assumptions. A fellow can only have a taste for adventure, it seems, because he’s one of life’s big winners. You were wrong the first time, and you’re wrong again. Three strikes and you’re out.
But is this any way to carry on a discussion? We might as well exchange tax returns so as to have an objective measure of who has the credibility to speak.
One difficulty in this area is getting good data. We know Harvard wins a lot of cross-admit battles (although not all of them), but how many families are, say, running the NPCs at Harvard and opting out of applying because they are not affordable? If they end up at, say, WUSTL instead on a merit scholarship, is that de facto a recruitment battle won even if there was never a Harvard application?
That said, according to Parchment at least, WUSTL wins 29% of cross-admit battles with Harvard (95% confidence interval 22.1% to 35.5%). Cornell only 9% (5.9 to 12.1), Brown 10% (6.6 to 13.5), Dartmouth 7% (3.8 to 9.6). Penn gets to 20% (15.4 to 23.6), Columbia 17% (12.8 to 20.5), Princeton 23% (19.1 to 26.7). Among the Ivy League, only Yale, by this measure, manages to top WUSTL at 31% (26.9 to 34.2) (Stanford is even higher, so is MIT but not a big enough sample).
There might be a lot of other explanations for that, but I also wonder if what WUSTL is doing with merit scholarships is in fact working pretty well.
By the way, this holds up if you test different combinations.
Like, WUSTL wins 40% (I am going to drop the 95% intervals for this discussion) against Yale. Cornell wins only 14%, Dartmouth 14%, Brown 18%, Columbia 30%, Penn 35%, and finally Princeton 40%. So only Princeton rivals WUSTL.
Last one for proof of concept: Princeton. WUSTL wins 37% against Princeton. Cornell 4%, Dartmouth 15%, Brown 20%, Penn 26%, Columbia 34%.
It is interesting, and a little unusual, that WUSTL wins more cross-admits than Princeton against Harvard, but then loses cross-admits to Princeton. Indeed, WUSTL loses head to head with Columbia (38%) and Brown (41%) too (Penn, Cornell, and Dartmouth are too small a sample).
But without doing this formally, I think this makes sense if you assume this is at least largely driven by merit aid.
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My view is that if a college has a “Why Us” essay, they care about demonstrated interest. I think every Ivy has one, except Harvard and Princeton.
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There are lot of students who don’t need any tutoring, beyond what is freely available on Khan Academy, to get a 1500 SAT.
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So I believe a 1500 is around a top 2.3% score. I would tend to agree that the (very) disproportionate percentage of high-SES kids who get into that range are not only, sometimes not at all, relying on expensive test tutoring specifically. But I think the ones who don’t need that sort of help to get such a high score at least have often had less direct, but no less important, forms of training that may have been expensive in one way or another.
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By that you mean, they were exposed to high quality education, which is tightly correlated with income? No argument there.
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So… our kids had a 1550 SAT equivalent (ACT 35) in middle school.
Our expensive resources consisted of copious amounts of books, pencils, and scrap paper.
…Oh, and yes, we did make a very conscious choice to have their mom stay home and direct her considerable pedagogical talent and training in mathematics towards our own kids while they were little.
But yes, it was a luxury we could afford (though not without considerable belt-tightening), and yes, it was a hugely expensive choice indeed, setting my wife’s career back a decade.
So this is a chicken and egg, nature and nurture type of problem.
Yes, families that value education tend to make generational investments of time and resources in it. It doesn’t necessarily mean they are rich (we definitely weren’t - and still aren’t, but to a much lesser degree:), but they will, as a group, do a lot better than average.
What is society to do about it? Where does good parenting end and unearned privilege begin?
Is there a way to “level the playing field” for the kids not born into such families? Tough question. I can’t think of any broad solution short of outright socializing kids, as the Bolsheviks proposed.
And even that would only work in a world where the nature or nurture question has been fully resolved in favor of the latter.
So even they never fully implemented it. 
ETA: But ending legacy preferences would be a good start.
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Parchment data wouldn’t show the reasons behind those cross-admit decisions, but I have no doubt that merit scholarships played a decisive role in many of those decisions in favor of WUSTL (or others like it). These schools would have stopped offering these scholarships if they didn’t work for them. Some publics also play this game with notable success.
From Harvard’s own website:
“The endowment’s support for operations enabled Harvard to grant $506 million in financial aid and scholarships in the 2022 fiscal year alone.”
Yes, and there are also a lot of non-school things that potentially matter.
Like, there is research on books at home and standardized test scores (not just in the US, as I recall), and I believe it controlled for other things, including family wealth and parental education. I believe the theory is reading for pleasure, discussions about reading, and so on end up preparing kids well for all sorts of reading-related tasks.
And that has been tied into summer activities too. That area of research, into what is sometimes called the “summer setback”, covers a lot of things, but this paper folds together the book issue and the summer setback issue:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02702711.2010.505165#.U3531CgWN-0
From the abstract:
Much research has established the contribution of summer reading setback to the reading achievement gap that is present between children from more and less economically advantaged families. Likewise, summer reading activity, or the lack of it, has been linked to summer setback. Finally, family socioeconomic status has been linked to the access children have to books in their homes and neighborhoods.
That study tested an intervention in the form of providing summer reading books to low-income families, and they found a statistically significant effect.
I think all this stuff and more helps explain why by the time kids are taking the SAT or ACT, there is a significant correlation with family income. Schools might explain some of that gap, but so could any part of a child’s life up to that point where math, reading, and so on could possibly have been happening, or not happening.
So that is an example of what I had in mind in terms of “less direct” forms of training for tests like the SAT and ACT.
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As usual, isn’t the answer “some of both”?
I would submit from the perspective of any child without “good parenting”, for whatever reason, it begins immediately.
Like, from my perspective, all children are born equally deserving of “good parenting”, and similarly none have “earned” it. So to the extent some have “good parenting” and some do not, that is unearned privilege.
Of course I don’t mean that to be insulting. It is not like the kids with “good parenting” did anything wrong. My point is just that they didn’t “earn” that, which is important because the kids without it didn’t “earn” that either.
I am aware of none that wouldn’t involve measures that would be completely unacceptable (like, removing all children from their natural parents and having them raised exclusively by the state).
Of course you can try to create a minimum amount of support for all kids. But stopping some parents from adding more to that minimum than others? I don’t see that ever being possible.
In the sense of putting a bandaid on an axe wound is a good start, sure.
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Which again raises for me the question of why, say, Cornell isn’t fighting in this way for cross-admits with Harvard and such. Indeed, why not a single Ivy League school does, whereas at least a significant percentage of non-Ivy schools in practical competition (at least at the margins) with Harvard and such do.
Patterns like that make me suspicious.
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I’m sure that is true, but Harvard also still got a positive contributions to its operating budget from net tuition (which is net of that aid).
So I think it is very much true gift income allows Harvard to have a (much) higher operating budget than it could otherwise.
But I also think it could not have the same operating budget without net tuition too.
This is pretty much what the Bolsheviks had in mind, until reality intervened.
They did manage a partial success with the children of the class enemy however.
It would sure take the edge off
I think there is some difference in how society views privilege of good upbringing bestowed by child’s family and how it views some other privileges, bestowed externally.
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Okay, enough back and forth on 1) Ivy League merit scholarships (or lack thereof) and 2) Trying to make sense of Harvard’s Annual Report; maybe we an stipulate that $52 billion is a lot of money.
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Yes. And? It throws off for FA what it throws off each year and that’s that. They cannot simply wave a wand and syphon whatever additional funds they like toward FA. Citing the total size of the endowment as if it’s some sort of slush fund to do with as they please is disingenuous at best.
Of course, things have changed over the decades. When people of current parent age were growing up, parents sent their kids to the local public school, and let them go play with their friends after school as long as they were home for dinner. Now, parents are more likely to be concierges or helicopter parents scheduling after school and summer vacation activities as well as homework time, so that their kids can have stronger college admission credentials.
Perhaps it is due to an increasing belief that US society is becoming more competitive, with greater penalties for falling down in the SES range. After all, in another thread, parents are saying that their kids out of college with better jobs than the parents had when they entered the job market would not be able to buy houses like what the parents bought back then, so striving for upward mobility (rather than merely staying at the same SES level as one’s parents) is seen as a must. Of course, it gets more competitive as you try for higher SES levels.
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What’s the pattern here that makes you suspicious, @NiceUnparticularMan ? You’re tantalizing me with a mystery I don’t have the clue to. Could it be that the other ivies are too proud to enter the fray? Or that they believe no one who really wanted to attend Harvard would desert it for a mere few thousand bucks? I favor the latter explanation. And it makes me highly skeptical that WUStl is sweeping up bona fide Harvardians. Isn’t it more likely that not everyone who gets admitted actually has Harvard as their dream school? I can’t stop thinking of Steven Pinker’s complaint that the kids who come to Harvard no longer have much interest in learning things - they’ve already hit the home run ball and their future is made. They have too many other things on the go to actually spend precious time attending his classes. This said by one of the most charismatic and interesting minds Harvard can boast of.
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